IMPORTANT POINT: It is important to emphasize that the intent of these posts are to share my understanding of Scrum, my initial thoughts on the distributed Rangers environment and the use of Scrum, and to discuss the content to be in a position to formulate a Scrum-based framework which will add benefits in our distributed, virtual and usually part-time Rangers projects that warrants the cost. Your candid feedback is therefore appreciated, either by adding a comment or sending me an email

Basic Scrum Time-Boxes

Release Planning Meeting … used to establish a plan and the goals for all the stakeholders. In essence the meeting answers how we can turn the agreed vision into a wining product, meeting or even exceeding stakeholder expectations.

Sprint … a time-boxed iteration, during which the scrum master protects the team from vision or scope creep that could affect the sprint goal. If a goal cannot be met, the sprint is aborted abnormally and restarted from the planning point.

Some initial thoughts on time boxes within Rangers projects

The suggestion is to use the planning, review and retrospective meetings as defined by the scrum basics, using technology such as LiveMeeting, Office Collaboration Services and MSN Messenger. Pre-meeting planning and preparations are essential, to ensure that information can be presented in a concise manner and such that remote users, joining over bad or unreliable communication channels, can participate.

Relative sizing can be done using a LiveMeeting/OCS poll as shown:

The advantage of LiveMeeting is that all of the Rangers have access to the technology, that the sessions can be recorded, that video streams (including Microsoft RoundTable) can be included to bring together a virtual team, and that distributed collaboration is possible through a number of effective features such as desktop or program sharing.

Sprint

Learning from past Rangers projects and taking the challenges into consideration, a four-week sprint is the recommended iteration duration. Selecting a shorter iteration adds immense administrative effort on the team, whereas a longer iteration increases the risk of the sprint not being completed successfully due to the part-time nature of the project teams.

Some of the phenomena’s encountered during typical part-time projects:

Declining interest and commitment, with resource drop-off’s

Two spikes and a dip of activity and energy

Growing “Angst” over time … what is the actual status?

Frequent scope, requirements and priority changes

Using scrum we can counteract these phenomena by introducing complete transparency across the projects, by introducing frequent inspections through scrum, review and retrospective meetings and by adapting our project teams and processes to introduce continuous improvements, promoting productivity, quality and making sure that the projects are “fun” from start to finish.

By carefully analyzing and managing the reduced and volatile team velocity we can ensure that the cost (admin, time and effort) introduced through the distributed, virtual and part-time teams is not under estimated.

based on recent experiments on distributed projects, using a four week sprint the team is able to deliver a tangible product, while the scrum masters can maintain full transparency, deal with impediments and minimise both the loss of resources and the status “Angst”. A shorter duration negates the benefits due to increased administration and interruptions, while longer sprints increase the chance of the phenomena mentioned above.

Also i think having weekly scrum meetings makes sense since most likely the contribution to the project is happening more to the weekend. So possibly having the scrum meeting Monday makes sense as well.